What does it take to create a program that matters to youth? We consider the issues from the theoretical to the practical through our work in Project Coach. PC is a Smith College program that teaches teenagers to be youth sport coaches. As a coach, our teenagers must inspire, communicate, problem solve, resolve conflict, plan strategically, and deploy a range of emotional intelligences.
PC uses sports as a means to engage, connect, and empower adolescents.

Friday, February 17, 2017

What do People living in Blue Zones, Egyptian Squash Players, Kenyan Runners, and Dominican Baseball Players Tell Us about Youth Development?

Don Siegel

The title of this post certainly suggests some strange
relationships. Yet, when we attempt to answer the age-old question about how and why we become what we are the age-old
adage Tell Me with Whom You Walk and I
Will Tell You Who You Are[1]
says a lot. This simple theme, and it’s many variations, can even tell us how
long we will live, whether we will be a world class runner, an elite squash
player, or, even, a major-league baseball player. Certainly, this does not
exhaust the possibilities, but illustrates that in virtually any area, knowing
with whom a youth associates, tells us a lot about who he is, and who he is becoming.
This is so because youth tend to acquire the attitudes, knowledge, skills, habits
and lifestyles of the groups to which they belong. Hang out with those having
healthy behaviors, and one begins to acquire such behaviors. Join a gang that
engages in illegal activities, and pursuing such activities becomes natural to
you. Go around with kids valuing education, and you begin to work harder at
school. Swimming downstream is a lot
easier than swimming upstream. Several
illustrations of this phenomenon follow and makes us wonder about how this morphing effect might be leveraged for
our work in youth development.

Blue Zones

If you want to live longer, try residing in a Blue Zone. These are locales around the
world where people normally live into their 90s and 100s. Dan Buettner has
identified seven such regions in the world.[2] Not
surprisingly, people in these zones tend to have lower rates of cancer, heart
disease, and dementia. Rather than having to think about and plan deliberately
about lifestyle practices and choices, as we do in the chaos of modern life,
folks living in Blue Zones simply
engage in normal activities typical of their community. These also happen to
promote health and longevity. The profile includes: engaging in regular and moderate
physical activity; having a purpose in life; experiencing lower stress; moderating
caloric intake; consuming more of a plant-based diet; drinking moderate amounts
of alcohol– especially wine; engaging in spiritual/religious activity; being
part of active family life; and connecting to one’s community. Although the
impact of any of these factors in promoting longevity may be difficult to
isolate, what seems clear is that just living as others in their community do, promotes
general well-being. A great deal of forethought or will-power is not necessary.
It’s just the way people live their lives in these places. Being part of the
social fabric is all that is necessary.

Can the morphing effect - normal daily
activities observation apply to other human activities? That is, how apt is
the adage Tell Me with Whom You Walk and
I Will Tell You Who You Are in explaining the development of expertise?The answer seems to be that just as Blue Zones promote longevity, other
locales where people excel at different things have cultures that promote excellence
in specific activities. Ultimately, what we see emerging from such locales is
that the most accomplished in the group become world-class performers.

Perhaps, the best example of this is Kenyans as distance runners.
Since Kip Keino’s gold medal performance in the 1500 meters at the 1968
Olympics, Kenyan middle and long-distance runners have played a dominant role
in international events. For the past forty years, this East African country of
about 45 million is producing a disproportional number of world-class middle
and long distance runners? But even more remarkable is that most of these
runners come from the Kalenjin Tribe, a small minority of about 5 million
within the country. Why are Kalenjin’s so good as middle and long-distance
runners?

While researchers have been trying to answer this question
for some time, it seems to come down to an array of factors that entail culture,
geography, lifestyle and body type. These elements seem to fit together seamlessly,
producing marvelously primed runners. As
pointed out by David Epstein, author of The
Sports Gene[3],
Kalenjin runners have very long legs, thin ankles and calves, less mass for
their height, and shorter torsos, all of which, makes them more bird-like, and more suited to distance
running. Geographically, the Kalenjin, come from the Great Rift Valley, a
relatively flat locale, found at an elevation of about 7000 feet. Combined, the
terrain and altitude provides ideal conditions for training runners. Additionally,
numerous observers have described a lifestyle where children run, often
barefoot, all the time, including trips to school, home for lunch, back to
school, and home again.[4] As
well, the Kalenjin are taught to be mentally tough by the various rituals in
which they are expected to partake as they pass into adulthood. Many believe
that such experiences develop the capacity to endure physical discomfort, which
is also a critical element of middle-distance and long-distance running. Finally,
job opportunities are few for Kalenjin’s. They can engage in subsistence
farming, or use running, with its rewards, as a way out of poverty. Like other
poor kids in many parts of the world they work extraordinarily hard in their
training, which by world standards is quite primitive.[5] Taken
as an aggregate, one can begin to understand, that being a Kalenjin, growing up
in the Great Rift Valley, is like being in a runner’s Blue Zone. There is little question that training is rigorous and
that those who reach world-class performance levels deserve great credit. Yet,
the conditions that support such achievement seem to be a part of daily life. Those
who excel on the world stage come out of this population, and are simply those
persons whoare on the top end of
this distribution. Lifestyle,
culture, and environment are the driving forces of running excellence.

Other, less well known, variations of this theme exist in
other sports. Why are Egyptians dominating in squash, and Dominicans in
baseball? Having a specific body type would seem to be less of a factor in
differentiating world class performers in these sports. Acquiring advanced
levels of knowledge, skill, and mental toughness would seem to be the key
factors. Several analyses, aligned with the normal
daily activities – way of life hypothesis
explain why and how these countries are producing world-class performers.

Today Egypt appears to be dominating the world squash scene,
having three of the top five ranked professional men’s players, winning seven
out of the past 12 World Opens, and winning the last three men’s
intercollegiate championships.[6]
Although, the country has a rich tradition of playing the sport from their British
Colonial days, it was not until the 1980s that Egyptians started to emerge on
the world scene. This was because talented players were unable to tour
internationally prior to then because of political turmoil, and were, thus,
forced to stay home, training and competing at various clubs in Cairo. An
unintended consequence of this was that younger developing players could
observe what elite players did, to train as they trained, and to compete with
and against them. Consequently, a culture of growing-up and playing the sport
at Cairo clubs emerged. As travel opportunities became possible again in the
1980s, the best of these club youths began appearing in and winning prestigious
national and international events.

A variation on this theme is also found in explaining why a
small country like the Dominican Republic produces so many professional
baseball players. During the 1980s major league baseball teams began investing
in building an infrastructure for the game there. Today, all 30 teams have facilities.
Their intent, just as with their extensive farm system, was to cultivate
talent.[7] Coupled
with an economy in which over one third of residents live in poverty, baseball
prowess took on great importance. With few other options, playing professional
baseball became a goal for large numbers of Dominican youth. From a young age
kids in flip-flops swing sticks at bottle caps aspiring to move up to training
academies where older youth sleep, eat, and live baseball.[8] From
some descriptions, the player development academies are like factories that churn
out baseball players, many of whom are major league prospects. Last season, a
bit over 10% of players in major league baseball came from the Dominican
Republic[9]. In a land with meager opportunities and the popularity of the sport, kids, in
large numbers, follow the path of living the sport by putting in hours acquiring
knowledge and skill at the game, often at the expense of pursuing education in
other areas.

Conclusion

From these observations one
can begin to understand why groups of people tend to take on certain
characteristics, whether these are connected to health and longevity or
athletic prowess. What we learn from such examples is that culture and
environment play a powerful role in shaping a population, and the world-class
exemplars who emerge from growing-up in such an ecosystem. While we might be
distracted by focusing our attention on the most extraordinary individuals arising
from a group, it is really the population distribution, as a whole, that gives
us a window into understanding how lifestyle and culture are the basis for
excellence, wherever we may find it.

New research from Chetty and
Hendren[10], [11] finds
that these same sorts of effects also impacts intergenerational mobility.
Specifically, they show that children from low income families living in low
income communities who move at birth to a wealthier county[12] have
10% higher incomes as adults. They assert that the effects of living in a wealthier
community are cumulative and include such things as access to better schools, being
part of and around more stable families, living in safer neighborhoods,
connecting with broader sources of social capital, and aspiring to and
attending college. Chetty and Hendren’s work also shows a dose-effect
relationship in that the more years a child coming from a poor family lives in
a wealthier community, the greater the benefits. Taken as an aggregate, this is
another example, of how powerful environment, culture and lifestyle is in shaping
lives.

From
a youth development perspective, the message that we should take from these observations
is that children, adolescence, and adults readily take on the properties of the
groups with which they are affiliated. Whether we are focusing on health
behaviors, athletic prowess, or economic mobility, where one lives and who one
associates with on a day to day basis shapes who we are. My conclusion is that
cultural and environmental effects are the most potent factor in how we acquire
attitudes, knowledge, skills, and behaviors. Consequently, those of us involved
with youth development should understand that our day to day activities and
interactions are as powerful in shaping our kids, as are the activities we plan
and implement. As Esmeralda
Santiago prophetically asserted Tell
Me with Whom You Walk and I Will Tell You Who You Are.